Top 25 things to do after installing Linux Mint 18 (Sarah) to make as user friendly

Linux Mint 18 (Sarah) was out on June 30, 2016. Fresh installation of Linux Mint 18 (Sarah) comes with plain systems, it’s not enough to make your Desktop as user friendly. We have to tweak & adjust some settings and install additional software’s to make your Desktop more easier as well as better for daily use. Assume you have already installed Linux Mint 18 (Sarah). If, no install right now Linux Mint 18 (Sarah).

1) Check for updates

Make sure your system upto date for better performance. How to check and do ? simply fire below command on your terminal to update your system packages to latest version. It will ask you to confirm for update, here you can see how much MB/KB going to upgrade, its purely depends on your system packages which you have installed.

Alternatively we can do via GUI by navigating, Menu >> Search Update Manager >> Open Update manager. Here you can see the MintUpdate packages. You will see list of available updates and hit Install Update button to install the updates. It will ask you to enter the sudo password to perform the update.

Linux Mint is better then Ubuntu ? How ? Because Linux Mint having more & more Themes, extensions, desklets (desktop widgets) and applet indicators is available by default in System Settings simply navigate and install then feel the desktop experience. If you are feeling it’s not enough, you can get more by clicking Get more online Button.

3) Install Linux Graphics Drivers

To get more & better performance from your Linux Mint box, you should install appropriate graphics drivers which will help you to run your environment smooth without any issues. Are you gamer ? then no other option, because without proper graphics drivers you can’t run any games on your system. You can done this by navigating System Settings >> Administration >> Device Drivers.

4) Install old Mint wallpapers

Every release of Linux Mint comes with a new set of wallpapers. Still you can install old wallpapers by running below command on your terminal.

6) Install GTK Theme

7) Install Media Codecs

Entertainment is one of the important things for everybody now a days, multimedia codecs are included in Linux Mint 18 default Repository. So, it will automatically installed by default. Even though you can recheck by running below command.

[Install old Mint wallpapers]
$ sudo apt-get install mint-meta-codecs

8) Set Google Search as default on Firefox

As you notice that the default search engine in Firefox is Yahoo. Google Search engine is not available in Firefox by default also not even listed there, We can enable it by visiting Mozilla Add-on page. Just click on Add to Firefox button to add it. Then click the Plus icon on search box and click Google Default Search, Finally change the Search Engine here on the drop down from Yahoo to Google.

9) Install Flash Player

By default Flash player & Java Applet comes with Mint Repository so no need to install those on Firefox but still we need to install Pepper based flash player for Chromium browser. It will download the pepper flash player from Google Chrome browser and put it inside Chromium.

11) Install Clementine Audio Player

Clementine is a cross-platform free and open source modern music player and library organizer. It is inspired by Amarok 1.4 to the Qt 4 framework and focusing on a fast and easy-to-use interface for searching and playing your music.

12) Install Inkscape Image Editor

Inkscape is a drawing and painting tool similar to Illustrator, CorelDraw, Xara X & Photoshop. Inkscape is 100% open source and available to everyone in the world. Inkscape is multi-platform available for Linux, Windows & Mac.